Choosing a good web hosting plan for your WordPress blog is one of the most important steps. When it comes to running a successful blog, server uptime and reliability matters a lot. Now, there are so many web hosting companies out there and picking the best one out of them might be a bit tricky. As a beginner, you probably don’t need VPS for hosting WordPress. Just any one of the basic shared web hosting plans should suit your needs.
Now that we have decided shared web hosting is enough to suit most users’ needs, it’s time to jump in to find which is the best company for hosting WordPress? Normally I would recommend Bluehost or SiteGround. But in this post, I am going to share an alternative solution with you which is as good and more affordable. GreenGeeks is so good that you can often find people searching for GreenGeeks vs Bluehost or GreenGeeks vs SiteGround on Google.
10 Reasons to host WordPress at GreenGeeks (GreenGeeks Advantages)
Before you go any further, I would like you to check out my detailed GreenGeeks review so that you can understand all the pros and cons of GreenGeeks. Now, let’s see how GreenGeeks compares to other popular hosting companies and a list of features that make it a promising alternative to Bluehost and SiteGround. Here are the top ten reasons to host your next WordPress site at GreenGeeks –
Affordable
One of the major pros of hosting your site at GreenGeeks is its affordability factor. Almost all GreenGeeks web hosting plans are affordable. This means anyone can sign up with them and start their own website even if they are on a tight budget. Currently, GreenGeeks offers three shared web hosting plans for WordPress and they are –
- Ecosite Starter – $2.95 per month
- Ecosite Pro – $5.95 per month
- Ecosite Premium – $11.95 per month
Their starting price is even lesser than what other major web hosting companies usually charge ($3.95 per month).
You can choose a plan according to your use case and requirements. For personal blogs and small websites, choose the Starter plan. If you are running a business website, go with the Pro plan. For eCommerce websites, it is recommended to go with the Premium plan as it is PCI compliant. This ensures that all credit card data is stored safely with restricted access.
Robust hosting platform
GreenGeeks hosting servers are powered by the latest technologies that are required for WordPress to run optimally. Here are some of the technologies that keep GreenGeeks ahead of the competition –
- Solid State RAID-10 storage arrays
- HTTP/2
- PHP 7
- MariaDB
- Scalable computing resources
- Container technology
They have also implemented a server-side caching system called PowerCacher. In addition to that, you can use a caching plugin like WP Super Cache or WP Rocket to improve your website’s overall speed. You can also check out to post on WordPress optimization to learn how to optimize WordPress for performance. By the way, GreenGeeks offers a 99.9% server uptime guarantee.
Free domain name
Registering a domain name can easily cost anywhere between $10 to $15 a year when you buy them from domain registrars like NameCheap or GoDaddy. But when you are building your site with GreenGeeks, you can register a domain name for free. There aren’t many companies that offer this feature. And who doesn’t like a free domain name? 😉
Oh, and there is no hidden fee charged from you for the domain name. After the first year, the domain name will renew at regular rates. If you have already got a domain name, you can easily transfer it to GreenGeeks. By the way, do check out my article on how to choose a domain name for your blog. You might find some important points to keep in mind before choosing one.
Unlimited resources
It is common for most web hosting companies to limit their resources and put a cap on how much storage space, bandwidth and MySQL databases you can use. But GreenGeeks allows you to add unlimited domains to your hosting plan and create as many databases as you want. This means you can host as many WordPress sites as you want on your GreenGeeks hosting plan.
Some web hosting companies allow you to add as many domain names as you want to your account but effectively limit the number of databases you can create. If you are aware of how WordPress works, you might be knowing how important a database is for WordPress. So, the essentially limit the number of sites you can create using WordPress or any other application which requires a database to function.
If you are running a blog with lots of multimedia, you will require a lot of bandwidth if you haven’t enforced proper caching policies on your web server. But with GreeGeeks, you can stop worrying about exhausting your bandwidth limit.
Daily backups
If you have used some of the WordPress backup plugins out there, you would have realized that most of the free versions limit the number of files that can be backup up or restored. Some of them even put a limit on the size of the import file (like, it should be less than 250 MB, etc) but they allow larger backups. How are we supposed to import them back whey they don’t tell us up front that it’s a premium feature?
With GreenGeeks, you needn’t worry about backing up and restoring your site. It is highly recommended to take daily backups of your entire site including to database to be on the safer side. I am on WordPress.com Business plan and I rely on Jetpack Professional to back up my site in real-time. But not everyone can afford or are willing to spend even a single dollar on a backup solution for their website. What they don’t understand is that having a proper backup of their website is very important and can save lots of time, effort, and money if something goes wrong.
GreenGeeks backs up your site every day and stores it in a secure location. So, in case an update went wrong or you got infected because of using a compromised WordPress plugin, you can easily restore your data from the previous day’s backup. What a relief!
You can also manually download your backup files any time you want. And you won’t be charged for this useful feature.
Secure environment
GreenGeeks also offers the best security features in the industry. You can protect your primary account using two-factor authentication.
There are also advanced security features enabled like –
- Hosting account isolation – One user cannot eat into another user’s resources
- Linux secure virtual file system – Protects against malware and other malicious activity
- Real-time security scanning – Scans for malware and isolates them in real-time
- Advanced clustered threat analysis – Identifies potential harmful attacks and enables custom rules
- Pro-active server monitoring – Identifies potential problems before they can occur
In addition to all the above security features of GreenGeeks, you can further strengthen your WordPress site by learning how to protect WordPress site from hackers.
Auto updates
It is common for most managed WordPress hosting companies to automatically update your WordPress site whenever there’s a new version of WordPress available or there’s an update to a plugin or theme you are using. This helps you keep your site secure by protecting it against the latest vulnerabilities for which the updates were released.
Moreover, updating all your WordPress sites manually can be an extremely time-consuming process especially if you have got a lot of plugins and you need to back up your site before updating a critical plugin.
On GreenGeeks, you can enable the auto-update feature and they will take care of all updates on your site. If the updater runs into any issues, it will simply roll back to the previous version or restore your site from the latest backup.
24/7 live chat support
GreenGeeks offers support via live chat, email, and phone. In addition to that, you can access their knowledge base and go through their support tutorials for free. If you have got any pre-sales questions, you can use the live chat or phone support. You can also reach the billing team through live chat.
Their live chat team is available 24×7 all throughout the year while their phone support is also available 24×7 but only during business hours.
If you face any technical issues (server-side or website issues), you can raise a support ticket to the appropriate department. Their expert technical support team will find you a solution without wasting much time.
Free website migration
If you have already got a website, you can transfer it to GreenGeeks for free. This saves you from the hassle of manually backing up your website files and database from your old web cPanel and restoring it to your new GreenGeeks account. Backing up a website from one place and restoring it to another server is no easy task. It requires a lot of patience and technical know-how. And if something goes wrong with your database and you don’t know how to fix it, you will waste a lot of time trying to find the root cause of your issue.
Instead of going through complex steps, you can sign up for a hosting plan from GreenGeeks and leave it to the experts. Just fill in the migration request form and their site migration team will transfer your website to GreenGeeks for you. Usually, there will be little to no downtime during this process. It depends on your website’s size and complexity. Once they have finished migrating your site, you can start working on your website as usual.
Money-back guarantee
GreenGeeks offers a 30-days money-back guarantee on all their web hosting plans. In case you are not happy or satisfied with your hosting plan or customer service, you can always request a refund and get your money back with no questions asked.
Do keep in mind that you won’t get a refund for the domain name (if you have registered one with them) as it works differently from hosting plans. Simply put, you won’t get the entire amount you paid as a refund if you availed their free domain registration feature. Somewhere around $10 to $15 will be deducted from the total refund. But the good news is that you will still own the domain name for the entire period of registration and you can use it with any other web hosting provider.
Conclusion
As you can see from the above list of features, GreenGeeks is simply the best and greenest way to host your WordPress site without polluting the environment. When you host your WordPress site at GreenGeeks, you can proudly save that you are using green energy to power your website and keep it running.
So, what are you waiting for? Go ahead and sign up for a web hosting plan at GreenGeeks right away.
I hope you found the above reasons to host WordPress at GreenGeeks helpful and enjoyed the read. If you did, please consider sharing this post with your friends and fellow bloggers on social media so that they can also discover this green web hosting company.